iTherapy
iTherapy, an innovative US startup, is redefining language therapy for children with autism spectrum disorder through mobile applications. This product has the ambitious goal of improving children's language and cognitive abilities. Their challenge was to create a system capable of automatically evaluating children's cognitive abilities to identify if they have autism spectrum disorder and, if so, determines their level of language and communication skills. The goal was to provide personalized vocabulary and expression recommendations to dynamically enrich their language.
To face this challenge, they rely on the Index of Productive Syntax (IPSyn) metric, designed to measure grammatical complexity in children's speech. Based on a vast collection of transcribed audio from children, both with and without autism, obtained from open sources such as TalkBank and Common Voice, they designed a unique diarization algorithm. This algorithm allowed them to separate children's interventions in conversations and transform them into text using speech-to-text conversion technology. They then trained natural language processing models to predict IPSyn, among other indicators. The entire system was implemented on AWS, culminating in a sophisticated recommendation system. This system, based on Markov chains, generates more complex expressions to enrich children's language promoting the development of their vocabulary and grammatical skills.
iTherapy's work with these models has been key to its technological development strategy, providing its application with innovative functions that have positioned iTherapy as a leader in the use of language technologies for children with ASD. Not only has this project raised iTherapy's profile in the industry, but it has also attracted attention for a phase two investment in a leading health innovation program, backed by the U.S. government.
SkillSync
MIST
